In the last few decades, there has been incredible progress in a variety of medical fields. At the same time, though, many fields have stymied and remained stagnant. Once such field is the treatment and prevention of catheter and implant infections. Despite many of the issues associated with indwelling catheters and implants, the primary of which is infection in many cases, there has been little effort put forth to solve these problems and the medical community at large just accepts these complications as a fact of life. What effort has been put forth to combat this problem has been directed at the sterilization of externalized catheters and devices. These devices typically are highly prone to infection, but they can be sterilized through the external application of anti-infective measures. The prior art in this field, then, mostly consists of devices and methods for sterilizing indwelling catheters and devices through the external application of bactericidal measures.
Fully implantable devices for the prevention of infection, though, have been limited to bactericidal and bacteriostatic coatings or the application of a small current/voltage to prevent bacterial adhesion. The use of an electronegative field to prevent bacterial adhesion, though, has been in development for quite some time and there is still no device that has been successfully commercialized with this feature due to the energy demands and poor cost-efficacy. The present innovation, then, provides a fully implantable novel device and method capable of actively preventing and treating infection of an indwelling catheter or implant.